


Put Your Dreams Away (For Another Day)

by james



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-28
Updated: 2011-03-28
Packaged: 2017-10-17 08:14:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/174760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/james/pseuds/james
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Danny has a secret, which he is forced to expose in order to save Steve's life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Put Your Dreams Away (For Another Day)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the After Holidays Prompt Fest. Thanks to embroiderama for the beta. I only got the first part of the prompt, alas, but I hope you enjoy. :-) Props as well to Len Wein and John Romita, Sr.
> 
> Prompt: Danny is secretly a ninja or has secret fighting skills or whatever. Steve figures this out and is like "Whaa-?!? I though I was the hero!" Steve decides to discuss this with Chin and Kono who both say, "Duh! Of course Danny's a secret ninja!" I don't know what would happen in the middle, but the story ends with sex or hooking up or something awesome.

It happened quickly, too quickly for Danny to do anything other than react -- had there been a second, even half a second, he might have come up with something else. He might have been able to turn, step away, bring up his gun or just throw himself forward bodily into the other man. Might have, could have, and second-guessing himself didn't help when it was already too late and he was standing in the middle of the warehouse, a dead body at his feet and his partner, just five yards away, not dead and not shot and not looking away from where Danny had just rescued him from the perp who'd been inches -- _razor's edge_ \-- away from firing the MAC-10 in his hands.

At such a short distance he would have cut Steve in half with the spray of bullets. Danny knew this, had known it before he acted, before he'd reacted without thinking beyond seeing Steve's wrists tied to the support beam above him and the gunman standing just too far away for Steve to reach, though he'd had been trying, body swinging back from a kick when Danny had come around the corner and seen them.

Now he stood still in the silence, without looking up at his partner, unwilling to see the look on his face and knowing for sure what sort of horrified expression would be there. Danny slid his claws back into place, feeling the snik of metal through the skin -- feeling the drip of blood where they'd broken through, slicing his hands they way they always did, and the sharp burn of it settling into his bones in an old, familiar taste he'd thought he might have finally escaped.

He heard the clink of the chains as Steve moved, and, not too far away, the sound of sirens. Back-up finally arriving; too late for anything but mop up. Without meeting his partner's eyes, Danny walked over and glanced up, not tall enough to grab the loop of chains around Steve's wrist but able to -- had he dared -- grab onto him around the waist and lift him those necessary few inches to let Steve unhook his hands.

Instead Danny found a crate, shoved it over so Steve could get his feet under him and Danny waited, still looking away -- not at Steve, not at the body leaking blood through three neat cuts sliced into his heart. He heard the soft sound of Steve's boots hitting the pavement and finally Danny risked a glance, to watch Steve's back as he went over to check on the perp.

He was shocked to find Steve staring at him, expression open and thoughtful and horrified.

Danny whispered, "That's what I was going to tell you."

~~~

_Two days previous_

Morning, early, and Danny wasn't willing to be awake yet. He was never willing to be awake very early, not unless someone small and giggling was the one tugging at the blankets, telling him he was going to waste the day away. But lately Steve was becoming a close second at giving Danny a reason to not mind being awakened. As the still-too-early-morning sun shone through the windows, Danny relented, opening his eyes and watching as Steve pulled on a shirt. Steve grinned down at him, hair matted to his skull and Danny knew there would be footprint-shaped puddles of water leading from the lanai to the bedroom. Steve always snuck out of bed for his morning swim without disturbing Danny -- waking him with the movement of the bed, but Danny knew where he was and recognized what was going on, and every time he just slipped back to sleep before Steve was out the door.

Danny rolled over, grumbling lightly for form's sake, and propped himself up on his elbows to watch. "Isn't that the wrong direction?" he muttered, as Steve tugged his shirt down into place.

Steve laughed, wide smile splitting his face and he knelt on the side of the bed, crawling up to give Danny a good morning kiss. "Don't you normally complain about me taking off my shirt?"

"At work! When we are out among people and we're doing our jobs as police officers, chasing down bad guys, you should not be taking off your shirt at the drop of a hat." Danny peered up at him. "But when we're here, with nothing but an entire Saturday to do nothing in, there is no reason a person should be wearing clothes. Unless he needs to go out and buy coffee and bread, in which case bring me back malasadas, bitch."

Steve laughed again. "Breakfast was over an hour ago, for those of us who got up on time."

"There is no such thing as 'on time' on a weekend. What's wrong with you?" Danny sat up the rest of the way and grabbed onto Steve's shirt, tugging him down again for another, longer and thus better, kiss. He could feel the heat of the day already trailing its fingers into the bedroom, the breeze from the window not strong enough to promise a milder day. At some point that day Danny knew Steve would point out it was only eighty-five, and Danny would have to explain that back home it was still in the thirties and his blood wasn't built for being warm all winter long.

He'd be telling lies, but Steve would know it, though he wouldn't think to call him on why. Danny stuffed away the feeling of guilt with practice, trying not to think of sleeping, cold and dark and frozen.

Later he'd think about other things, like coffee and someplace interesting to have slow, easy sex, but for now Danny just kept a hold of Steve, making eyes at him in hopes that the shirt would come off and the shorts would follow suit and there would be naked and bed and not getting up until Monday at the earliest.

Steve narrowed his eyes. "How can you stand to lie around all morning?" he asked, as if they didn't have some form of that same conversation every time Danny stayed the night on a weekend. It was only on weekends when Grace wasn't in the room down the hall, of course, because on those weekends she would already be calling out that she wanted breakfast and could they go swimming and was it safe to come in Uncle Steve or are you still kissing.

Danny gave Steve a lazy grin. "I'm very good at sleeping." He leaned back against the headboard, letting his legs fall open, still under the sheet but it was thin enough to make everything on display perfectly obvious. Steve certainly wasn't looking away; he'd had his hands all over Danny just hours before, so Danny was fairly sure he remembered what was under there.

Then Steve surprised him by looking up with a serious expression on his face. Danny frowned and found himself sitting up, leaning forward. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," Steve said quickly, but his gaze skittered away from Danny's, just for a second, before meeting his eyes with a determined, worried look.

Danny opened his mouth to point out that worried face had a name, a number, and a list of times Danny had seen it in action. Except there was something else there, something that made him swallow the teasing words and just say, "Tell me."

Steve seemed to steel himself, meeting Danny's eyes and he said, "I just-- I thought...we've been doing this for a few months, now, and everybody knows and Chin and Kono are okay with it and Grace--" He stopped, clearly trying to think, frustration on his face as he tried to speak again.

With a soft laugh, Danny ran his fingers down Steve's arm, finding his hand half-hidden in the sheet. He tugged, got his fingers wrapped around Steve's wrist. "This doesn't sound like a 'isn't working out for me' speech," he said gently. If he was right, he'd seen this one coming -- since about the same time he'd first seen Steve look at him like he wanted to strip Danny bare.

Steve shook his head, quickly. "No! No, I uh...thought you might...I mean, you're here a lot of the time anyway. Not nearly often enough, actually."

"You think we should save on gasoline, and commute from the same driveway?" Danny asked, trying to hide a wider smile. He'd known, and he'd been waiting -- keeping track of the days because Steve was a giant dork and couldn't hide what he felt from a blind man in Alaska, even if the man himself didn't always seem to understand what those feelings meant.

Or maybe he'd just grown used to nobody caring how he felt, Danny thought. He was a little surprised at the thought, then realized he was starting to get flashes of insight more often as he spent time with the man he was growing so used by having around.

Steve was nodding and the worry in his eyes had already vanished, replaced by the goofy grin Danny usually saw when Danny stumbled into the kitchen, straight from the bedroom, hair sticking up everywhere and eyes barely open in his search for coffee. "Yeah," was all he said, and Danny rolled his eyes.

"You need to watch more movies with Grace," he said. "There's a lot you can learn about romantic proposals in Disney films." But he tugged Steve down for a kiss where he lingered for a moment, pressing their lips together. He felt Steve lean down against him, apparently willing now to do all the things Danny had been trying to entice him into before.

"You want me to find the magic spell to make you stop being a frog?" Steve asked, and Danny just poked him in the chest. "Sorry, I mean, one of the seven--" was as far as he got before Danny poked him again, much harder.

"I haven't said 'yes' yet, asshole," Danny reminded him.

Steve grinned, but ducked his chin down and looked up at Danny, trying -- and failing -- to look penitent. "Will you please move in with me?" he asked, and Danny was frankly surprised to hear him say it in actual, unequivocal words.

He couldn't stop himself from grinning, which made Steve grin back and for a long moment they were a room full of stupid grins and idiotic looks, and Danny couldn't be bothered to care. Except, as reality crashed in a few moments later, Danny's smile died and he had to tighten his grip on Steve's wrist to prevent him from moving away.

"The answer is yes, but I-- I've got to..." He took a deep breath, and he discovered that he really wasn't prepared for this. He'd seen this coming and he'd told himself he had to do this. He'd known he needed to be ready to say it, that he needed to tell Steve before it was too late and he tore something apart that couldn't be fixed. He'd lied to Rachel but he'd realized, somehow, the lies he'd distracted her with wouldn't come close to convincing Steve.

How he'd managed so far to keep Steve from getting too close, he wasn't sure. He'd managed to always move his arms just so, turning away from Steve's fingers when they drifted too closely. It only worked because he didn't let himself give in to Steve's entreaties to stay the night as often as he wanted; that would change now and eventually Steve would discover what Danny was hiding.

It might have been better to say it before now, before he was in Steve's bed more often than not, before Steve looked at him with an easy happiness that made him think about forevers and always. But he'd been afraid -- possibly rightfully so. If this broke them apart then he might be ruining everything from his relationship to his job to his place on this warm, sunny island.

So he'd bargained his days, one after another, betting that he could keep this for as long as it lasted, just in case this moment led to unacceptable losses, losing Steve and losing Five-0 and losing everything but the one thread he'd have remaining, his daughter.

Danny took a deep breath, seeing the shadows and confusion in Steve's eyes building like a storm front washing down towards the shore. Danny took a deep breath and said again, "The answer is yes, because I love you, and I just need to tell you one thing."

Steve frowned, his entire body gone tense. Danny could feel the muscles tighten beneath his fingertips, wanted to soothe him but all he could do was rip the metaphorical bandage off and get it over with. Then the Steve's cell phone rang with the ring tone he'd assigned to only the governor, and ten minutes later they were running out the front door for the car, Danny already calling in Chin and Kono to meet them at Five-0 headquarters.

~~~

That afternoon Steve had gone missing, gun runners surfacing and vanishing like the rippled backs of crocodiles in the river, with just as many teeth and just as much danger for whomever they caught in their jaws. They'd caught Steve, and Danny had driven the team and the HPD until he'd felt like everyone around him might drop, shoving away his own lingering exhaustion to keep himself focused on the task. One mission, search and rescue, and the island wasn't so large that Danny couldn't search every inch of it on his own, step by step, until he located his missing partner.

A day and a half later he'd found Steve at last, held prisoner in the warehouse. Danny had called Chin and snuck in, unwilling to wait to see if the body dangling from the chains was still breathing. He'd heard men talking outside, discussing the uselessness of their captive now that their job was done. Danny had rounded the corner as Steve's executioner had raised his weapon, ready to fire.

Danny had reacted the only way he could to save Steve's life. It left him standing in the middle of a warehouse, sirens growing louder and Steve staring at him with eyes wide and face pale and Danny could only hope it was because of injuries and not because of what he had seen. He swallowed, flinched, then didn't move as Steve reached down and grabbed his hand. He watched as Steve raised Danny's hand and looked at the wounds on the back of it, at the three thin lines of blood still dripping from where his claws had come out.

"You--" Steve began, then they both turned to look as the loading dock door began to slide open. Steve dropped Danny's hand but shot him a look which Danny understood all too well. He nodded, resigned, because he hadn't expected to escape this conversation -- he'd only hoped he could have introduced it better. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wrapped it around his knuckles, not hiding the injury but disguising the details of it.

Chin, Kono, and a half a dozen uniformed cops poured through, kevlar vests and weapons out, and Danny realized with a guilty start that he hadn't radioed them to let them know the bad guys were dead and Steve was all right. He glanced at Steve and saw the other man watching the others, jaw clenched as Chin and Kono ran up, taking in the at-rest stances of both men and slowly lowering their own weapons.

"Everyone okay?" Chin asked, glancing from Steve to Danny, frowning slightly.

"Fine," Steve said, still tense and tightly-controlled, and Danny was grateful when they took it to be stress from being held prisoner, and not from finding out that his partner was a freak.

~~~

It took the rest of the day to get away. Danny went with Steve to the hospital, playing up the overly-concerned partner that everyone expected him to be. It wasn't difficult, he did and said exactly what he would have if Steve hadn't seen anything. But it was hard to meet Steve's eyes, and so Danny focused his nerves on yelling at the doctors who wanted to hold Steve overnight for observation.

Steve backed him up on that one, insisting he could rest at home, but then it was a quick stop at headquarters and debriefing, which included a visit from the governor and more paperwork than Danny really wanted to be faced with. But he stayed at his desk with his head down over it, listening with half an ear to the sound of Steve's and Jameson's voices drifting through the open door from Steve's office. He couldn't make out the words, but the tone was calm, free of things like accusations of recklessness -- or demands to know what the hell had gotten assigned to Steve's task force.

The entire day Steve acted like nothing was wrong, only giving Danny sharp looks whenever they couldn't get alone long enough for Steve to demand answers. Danny didn't tell him when he snuck out and went to the morgue, pulling out the knife he'd already described in his reports and slipping it into each of the man's wounds. The knife blade was longer and wider than the metal blades of his claws, disguising the shape of what had killed him and giving Danny a weapon he could blame it on. If anyone looked closely they'd realized the cuts were made post-mortem, but nobody was going to be looking, and Danny soon had the knife logged into evidence so no one would be asking him how he'd managed to kill a man with his bare hands.

When he returned to headquarters Steve simply walked out of his office, telling Chin he was going home and that Danny would keep an eye on him, per doctor's orders. Danny saw the sympathetic look on Chin's face and felt the words sticking in his throat. What words, he didn't even know, not a clue what he could have said to make this all seem normal. But Chin just nodded, like it was all just aftershocks of the last forty-eight hours and that nearly losing Steve was all the reason Danny needed to be speechless.

And dear God, but it was, and Danny couldn't even begin to think about that, because he'd been so focused on finding Steve and getting him back, and now all he could do was wait on eggshells for his partner to let him have it. He wanted to dig his fingers into Steve's arms, drag him close and smell his skin, taste his mouth, and listen to his heartbeat until Danny's subconscious started to believe that Steve was alive and well.

He had to wait and see if he was still going to be allowed the privilege. He followed Steve to the car and got in, not arguing about which of them was driving his car or reminding Steve to at least obey the speed limit for a change.

For his part, Steve didn't say a word either. A glance over showed the grey edge of exhaustion that Danny himself felt, and he knew they were both holding on by just a few last threads. He let his head fall back against the seat and stared out the window, letting the noise in his head fall silent save for one thing, swirling around in his head. _What if he changes his mind?_ He hadn't ever really thought about it, what losing Steve would honestly feel like. He'd skirted the consequence whenever he'd tried to face the decision to tell him, but he'd never gotten farther than just knowing what would happen.

He'd never looked at what it would feel like: the hole ripped in his chest as surely as the man he'd killed. The uncertainty of not knowing if he would be welcome, stilled the urge to reach over and touch Steve's hand. If Steve shied away from him, kicked him out or simply called him a freak Danny knew he would go, he wouldn't argue, but he suddenly realized just how much it would tear him up inside.

The last two days of searching, not knowing if Steve was alive or dead or if they would ever find him at all had nearly driven Danny insane, fighting the urge to simply start at one end of the island and begin tearing down doors and demanding answers from anybody able to provide them. Seeing Steve open his eyes and look at him should have been a relief to all his fear, it should have lead to holding onto him and hearing Steve chide him for taking so long.

Instead, Danny's heart still hadn't quite slowed down and he was still holding himself tightly so he wouldn't start shaking.

Neither of them spoke when they arrived at Steve's place. Danny followed Steve inside through to the kitchen and accepted a beer, then followed Steve again out the back door until finally Steve sat down. He was facing away from Danny, staring out at the ocean and giving nothing of his thoughts away, so Danny dropped into the chair beside him and waited for his world to fall apart. He could feel his hands trembling and clutched his bottle of beer so as not to give himself away.

Steve drank a swallow of his beer before he turned and looked at Danny. His face was as guarded as Danny had ever seen; there was nothing at all to be read there. "I think you had better start telling me," Steve said.

Danny sighed, and nodded. "I've been...trying to figure out how," he confessed. "I don't know the best place to begin."

"How about with the claws I saw come out of your hands?" Steve asked with a bite of sarcasm, which might have been anger or might have been fear.

Danny gave him a sad smile. "That isn't actually where it begins," he said, but then he nodded, because he had to start somewhere and it ultimately didn't matter where. He leaned back in his chair, staring up at the warm, blue sky, and started to speak.

"Right after the Second World War, the US Army started a program. They wanted to build 'super soldiers', just like what kids were reading about in comic books. They wanted to add armor, and weapons, and...whatever the hell else they could think of. They took a bunch of new recruits -- anybody who had no family, no one who would be missed. And they started experimenting. A lot of them failed," Danny said, and he quickly shuttered away the memories. Faces and screams, nights filled with blood and agony, and men -- boys, really -- reaching out from their hospital beds to lace their fingers together, holding on because there was nothing else they could do.

Danny looked down at the back of his hands. "They tried a lot of things, sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. One poor bastard got the whole works; I don't even know what happened to him." He took a drink of his beer, shoving aside the memories that this story-telling was dredging up. The nightmares of it all crowded his thoughts, not giving him any space to recover from the stress he'd just been through. Danny took a deep breath and tried to let it all settle.

He was quiet long enough that Steve asked, "So how did you end up with those?" There was no clue in Steve's tone what he thought of it all.

Feeling defeated, Danny looked over at him and said simply, "Cryonics." He hesitated, and as Steve's eyes began to widen, Danny said, "I was born in 1934. Joined the army in '52, and right out of Basic they said 'would you like to join a special project.' I said yes." He shrugged as if it had been no big deal. And it hadn't, because back then you wanted to join up, you knew serving your country was an honorable thing. You trusted the government to take care of its people and a fresh recruit hoping to defend his country from the Communists would never even dream that so much of his life would be turned into a living hell.

Danny looked out at the beach, seeing the clean sand barely marked by footprints. The ocean was calm and the breeze was no stronger than it had been two mornings ago when he'd wanted nothing more than to bury himself in Steve's bed, and Steve's body.

"Nineteen thirty four," Steve echoed, and he sounded stunned, but still Danny couldn't tell what he believed. At least he'd seen, he knew that some part of this was real. The claws were hard to explain away as illusion or imaginary, especially when the results of them had lain on the ground leaking blood onto the concrete.

Danny sat back in his chair and took another drink of his beer, not really tasting it but letting the alcohol do some vague work at relaxing him and making this easier. "They worked on us for a couple years, then sent us out to Korea. Kept tinkering, fixing things and making improvements and sending us back out again to see if any of us turned out to be the super soldiers they were hoping for. Then, in 1955, they decided they needed to wait until technology had advanced more and they froze us all."

"Cryonics didn't get invented until 1962," Steve said, but Danny could hear the surrender in his words of protest.

Danny gave him a flat look, anyhow. "That was when civilians got their hands on it. I don't know if it got leaked, or the project gave it away, or if they just stumbled on it on their own. I wasn't awake for that part of it. Slept right through the last of the fifties and part of the sixties until they defrosted us in '61 for 'Nam. The first time."

He took another long pull of his beer. They'd thawed them all out three times for Vietnam, though only the first time involved new improvements, more rounds of surgeries and listening to each other trying not to scream in their sleep. Morphine had replaced opium as the establishment's painkiller of choice, which Danny and the others had appreciated the effectiveness of it, if not the easy addiction. But none of it killed the memories or the awareness of what was being done to them. He shivered, feeling the cold sensation wash over him though he knew it was only in his mind.

Danny rubbed a hand over his face and tried to regain the thread of his story. "They defrosted us seven times, all told. Sometimes just to work on us, mostly to send us out on short missions, test out what they'd done. I don't know.... I never figured out if they thought we were a success or not. The longest they left us awake was eleven months, in 1968. Spent most of it in Vietnam again, but when we came back to the States, someone -- the staff psychologist, I think -- decided we needed to stay awake for awhile, let our brains and bodies get used to moving around or something. They talked about atrophy and shit; I don't know. Maybe someone just felt sorry for us. They gave us a couple months to just go be people." Danny shrugged, because it hadn't made sense then, and it didn't make sense now.

All he knew was that for part of one summer he'd been normal. Not a soldier, not a freak, not a lost kid from another time who didn't know what the hell most of the things were that he was seeing. Or hearing; God, the music had been insane. He gave Steve a grin he didn't quite feel and said, "I went to San Francisco, hung out with some people who didn't ask questions about why I acted like I'd been living on Mars."

There was a moment before Steve smiled, almost looking normal in his amusement. "You hung out with hippies?"

Danny nodded. "I did, indeed. Free drugs, free love, and no one cared when I didn't know who the Beatles were, or had never seen a cassette tape." Or why he woke up at night screaming, because they knew he'd been in the war so they just held him close, sending him back into sleep with fucking or grass, whichever was most convenient. "Then time was up and we got sent back to the project. After a few more experiments, they froze us again."

He fell silent, holding the empty bottle of beer and seeing nothing. Images blended together, the bright colors and loud music of the summer in the City of Love, and the shattering of gunfire in the trees, shouts of soldiers and others, dying, fighting, getting lost in the soft noise of the traffic, a few streets away from Steve's house.

"So how'd you end up here?" Steve asked, quietly.

"Twelve years ago I woke up. The lab had been destroyed -- a fire, no clue how it happened. The whole compound was underground, hidden away. Hard to get in, hard to get out." He'd stepped over bodies, burned and twisted, all reaching for doorways and vents, trying to find a way out as the flames had overcome them. "The other cryonics chambers were too badly damaged, none of the others survived. No one else got out, as far as I could see. I found one guy about my size and I dug out his wallet and keys. Stole his ID and went back to his apartment, holed up for a couple days. Then a letter came in the mail, saying he'd been accepted to the police academy." Danny shrugged. "The guy had no family; no one did who worked for the project. So no one knew me, and no one knew the Williams kid who showed up for his first day of training."

He looked at Steve then, met his gaze square-on. He waited, knowing there were so many things he needed to say, so many questions Steve would have yet to ask. He deserved answers, Danny knew, but he couldn't pull any more words out without help.

"What's your real name?" Steve asked, his tone guarded again. The question didn't surprise him in the least.

He smirked, not really feeling the amusement. "Daniel Richards. I figured it was meant to be, when I didn't have to learn to answer to a new first name." He bit his lip, though, and tried to see something in Steve's face. Something that would tell him if he was making things worse, or if Steve was just dragging everything out, as was his due, before throwing Danny back out on the street.

"And Rachel?" Steve asked, nodding towards Danny's hands.

Danny stared at them. The sheaths which housed the sharp blades were barely visible. "I told her my arms had been broken, badly, and they'd put in metal pins. She never asked anything more about it."

Steve nodded absently, as if something had suddenly made sense. Then he asked, "So...no one else knows? About them?"

"As far as I can tell. Nobody has ever come around to take me back. I've dug a little, and never found anything about the project in any records I can find. Of course, I'm not very good at that sort of thing. Chin might be able to find something, but...I don't know what sort of attention that would draw. I don't even know if the project had a secret name or not. They didn't talk to us much beyond giving us our orders."

"So you...just act like Danny Williams, cop, and you never...." Steve waved a hand, indicating nothing, or possibly everything.

"I try to forget they're there," Danny said. "I try to forget everything they did to me, try to forget that when I was a boy I sold newspapers for a nickel, and that everybody was thinking there would never be another Great War. I listened to Buck Rodgers on the radio, and Dick Tracy, and I had a huge crush on Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant and Lauren Bacall. God, and Betty Grable." Danny tilted his head, looking up at bright blue sky, and remembered the photos he'd stuck to his wall. "Every man from age twelve to ninety had a picture of Betty Grable somewhere, hidden from his mother or wife." He grinned, glancing over at Steve.

Then he blinked, shocked, because Steve was smiling back at him. Hesitant and looking just a little lost, but he was smiling and as Danny stared, Steve reached over and took hold of Danny's hand. Danny jumped, but he didn't move enough to pull his hand away on accident, and after he'd forced himself to settle back into his chair, he tried, tentatively, to tighten his grip on his partner's hand.

Steve wrapped his fingers around Danny's hand, tugging at him just a little and rubbing his thumb along Danny's wrist. Danny wanted to ask a hundred questions of his own, including how can you just sit there and what the hell are you going to do now. But it looked almost like Steve wasn't going to call it quits on him.

Danny let his eyes close, and he let the smell of the ocean fill his senses, let his world spiral down to the ocean and the warmth of Steve's fingers entwined with his.

~~~

They said nothing more, beyond Steve standing up after a few more minutes and saying he needed sleep. He kept hold of Danny's hand, pulling him inside and upstairs to bed. Danny hadn't quite believed that Steve was willing to let things go, accept them so readily, but he conceded that exhaustion was a great motivator to just ignore everything for awhile. They'd fallen almost immediately to sleep, and Danny woke late the next morning to find Steve still wrapped up around him.

Danny still felt worn out from the last two days, the worry and fear they would be too late -- and he firmly shoved those thoughts away with the bittersweet ease of far too much practice. He had no great desire to crawl out of bed to deal with anything the day might bring. He shivered at the thought of how, living in Jersey, he'd never been able to sleep when he was cold, how he'd made Rachel laugh and grumble at the way he heated the house and buried the bed in blankets.

In Hawai'i he sometimes felt like he could stay in bed for years, cozy and safe and warm. He'd never been able to tell Rachel how it frightened him, closing his eyes in the cold, never quite believing it would only be tomorrow when he woke. But here, in Hawai'i, he'd discovered he could stay in bed long after the sun rose, stretch out on the mattress and feel no urge to get up and feel no trills of fear that it wasn't just sleep that was creeping upon him as his body fell still and silent.

Now he felt the double urge to stay where he was, with the warmth and Steve pressing in around him. He didn't feel Steve stirring at all, hadn't been woken by him getting out of bed for a swim. Danny turned his head just enough to sneak a peek and saw Steve's face half-hidden by the pillow. He was sound asleep, faint lines of exhaustion still showing, a worried line between his brows. Danny shifted just a little, wondering suddenly if Steve would wake up and tell him it was over, that he'd slept on it and decided it was too much.

The movement caused Steve to stir, and he tightened his arm around Danny's middle. He pressed his face deeper into the pillow and breathed out Danny's name.

Danny closed his eyes.

~~~

It wasn't until Danny desperately needed to pee and get some coffee that he dragged himself reluctantly out of bed, a good two hours after he'd felt Steve finally get up. He headed downstairs and found Steve making breakfast -- or possibly lunch, given the time showing on the microwave clock.

He shook his head, giving in to the near-constant urge to acknowledge, somehow, just one of the many things he still couldn't quite believe existed. Then he smiled reflexively as Steve handed him a mug of steaming coffee, and decided that automatic coffee makers were one of the best inventions ever in the history of mankind.

He took a sip and watched as Steve went back to the omelets he was preparing. Danny watched for a moment before he cleared his throat. "Don't get me wrong," he said carefully. "But how is it you're not freaking the fuck out?"

Steve glanced at him, shrugging one shoulder as he flipped the omelet with the spatula in his other hand. "I spent a lot of years in the SEALS," he said, sounding calm and perfectly recovered from his stint as a hostage. The bruises on his face and arms wouldn't fade for another few days, but Steve was acting like he'd already forgotten they were there. He looked at Danny more directly and said, "I can't say I heard anything about your project, but...you hear things. See things, sometimes. The idea that the military had a secret project to turn guys into super soldiers...doesn't exactly come as a huge shock." He paused, then sent Danny a sidelong look. "Besides, I felt them. When you were asleep sometimes. Could never figure out why you didn't like me touching you there. You never mentioned them, so I thought, at first, something like what you told Rachel. Only your records didn't list any injuries like that. I figured you'd tell me, eventually." Steve glanced at him again, his expression calm.

"You _knew?_ "

"I never guessed you had claws in your arms, no." Steve gave him a half-smile. Then he shrugged again. "You get used to not asking questions."

The comment made Danny wonder what sort of missions Steve went on -- then realized he didn't have to wonder, because he'd been sent out on some of those same kinds of things. Only he'd been less well-trained than a Navy SEAL. He'd seen Steve in action and he knew he couldn't compare, not even with the claws. His superiors had shown no concern about anything other than the metal they'd shoved into his arms and how well did they work and never any questions about could he fight without them, could he use a gun so he could protect his team from a safer distance away. Or could he read a fucking map to get himself back to base, or speak any of the languages spoken in the places they threw he and his teammates into. How that was supposed to make them super soldiers, _better_ then the others, he'd never understood.

Like Steve said, you got used to not asking, you got used to be told what to do and just doing it and hoping they'd leave you alone one day.

He watched as Steve calmly slid an omelet out of the pan and onto a plate, and held it out to Danny. He took it, glanced down in reflex to see what island shenanigans Steve had added to it. He could see tomatoes and mushrooms and egg.

"There's no pineapple," Steve told him, exasperated.

"Who would put pineapple in an omelet?" Danny demanded, even though he knew the answer was 'Steve McGarrett, just to make Danny make that face.' But he set the plate down and picked up a fork -- not willing to part with his mug of coffee, not even for food. He took a bite and discovered it tasted pretty good, and that there was, in fact, no pineapple or anything bizarre in it at all. His whole world was a little bizarre, and he was having trouble wrapping his brain around the fact that Steve was apparently willing to sleep with a man who had secrets and simply made him breakfast when those secrets finally came out in the open. He glanced up and found Steve looking amused.

"I don't put pineapple in everything," Steve pointed out.

"Says the man who tried to give me coffee with pineapple flavored creamer," Danny retorted, feeling something inside him settle at the familiar give-and-take. "You should be very glad I didn't kill you in your sleep. Or in your awake. There are some things that are against the laws of nature."

Steve just smirked and went back to fixing the second omelet. Danny watched him for a bit, enjoying his own breakfast and trying to tell himself not to worry. After a minute Steve looked at him, quirking an eyebrow. Danny looked down, toying with his fork and taking another drink of coffee before he could make himself ask, "You still want me to move in?"

There was a clatter as Steve dropped the spatula, then he was holding onto Danny's arms and tugging him forward. "Yes; God, yes. Danny, I haven't changed my mind about that."

"Even though I'm a freak?" He could hear his voice break a little, because Steve was acting like none of this mattered.

Steve looked at him, and all the masks and confusion and worry from the night before were gone. Steve's eyes were clear, and Danny found he could read them as easily as he had the week before, the months before, when he could read his partner as easily as a newspaper spread out on the table. There were even headlines, the quirk of his mouth and set of his eyebrows announcing in simple terms what the topic of the day's expression was.

He was still worried, which didn't come as any surprise, but there was no hesitation in him. Steve wasn't pulling away from him, wasn't flinching away from touching him or constantly glancing down at Danny's hands. Maybe he _had_ encountered something before, some other reject from a military project. He didn't want to ask, wasn't sure Steve would tell him anyway, citing security clearance and classified need-to-know. Danny, for all his involvement as one of the Army's secrets, didn't know much beyond what he'd experienced directly. Subjects didn't get cleared to know things, and most of the science behind the technology had been beyond him, anyhow, way back at the beginning as much as now, with eighty years of advances he'd mostly slept through.

He'd tried giving himself a crash course, twelve years ago, but it had proven hard enough to learn how to be a cop and how to fake being a product of the 1980s. He'd given up on teaching himself chemistry and astrophysics, and even now, after over a decade of living like a normal person, he found the world slipping past him sometimes and leaving him feeling bewildered.

One thing didn't change, in the history of the world. The way Steve was looking at him, nudging closer and leaning down, the way he touched his lips to Danny's; you didn't need to be a cryonics scientist to understand what it meant. He let Steve hold him tight, kissing him and making the fear that gripped his heart finally begin to ease. They stood there -- until the smell of burning eggs flung them apart and Danny just laughed until he couldn't stand upright and he leaned against the counter as Steve tried to rescue his breakfast.

He shared his own omelet, of course, and helped Steve air out the kitchen to get rid of the smoke. Then he teased Steve about it for another hour, right up until Steve mentioned they had the day off and could spend it going over to pack up Danny's things, and Danny mostly forgot all about the burnt breakfast.

He fidgeted as they drove over to his apartment, more nervous than he'd ever been marrying Rachel -- except for the actual wedding, and except for the moment they'd put a wriggling bundle in his arms and told him it was a girl. He knew why he was nervous, still half-expecting Steve to change his mind, and he covered his nerves by talking.

Steve just let him talk. After awhile he realized that Steve kept steering the conversation until Danny was telling him stories about growing up, his friends from so long ago, and how much trouble he'd got into at school and just how much his crush on Sinatra had been stronger than his crush on Betty Grable. Danny talked about learning the words to every one of Sinatra's songs and how delighted he'd been to get defrosted in the Seventies and found out he'd recorded more songs.

Danny told him about wearing a fedora almost every day for two years and how he'd practiced his swagger, thinking about just how embarrassingly young he'd been. He talked about people he'd known way back then and how he'd tried, several years ago, to look some of them up and how he'd had to stop doing that when he kept finding old men and women he no longer knew.

As they drove back to Steve's place with Danny's stuff all crammed into the back of Steve's truck, Danny rested his elbow on the window sill and said, "I still find myself slipping, sometimes, like I'm half a step away from falling back out of this world and into my own. Like a lost time traveler, I'm gonna wake up one day and find myself in an Army cot in a tent in Korea, having a weird dream about super soldiers and traveling into the future." He swallowed, heard Steve begin to respond and said quickly, "And sometimes I still think I'm gonna wake up and it'll be some day even farther in the future and I'll have lost it all again."

Steve reached over and took his hand. For a moment Danny just sat there, feeling Steve's hand and reminding himself that everything was going to be okay. Steve was alive, and well, and Danny hadn't lost him.

After a bit he couldn't stand the silence anymore and Danny found himself babbling about something, anything that came to mind, and he heard himself saying how the heat of Hawai'i helped him sleep, no matter how much he bitched about being here. Steve grinned at him, wide and smug, and none of it hid the look in his eyes that made Danny think Steve was half a second away from them pulling over and hugging the stuffing out of him. Danny just rolled his eyes and added, "And yes, you great mook, you help with that, too."

Steve didn't stop grinning at him the entire way back, and when he'd offered to go out to buy dinner Danny had teased him again about burning breakfast. He commented on the unburnt taste of dinner afterwards, as well, going on about it until Steve threatened to uninvite him from moving in, and possibly file for verbal harassment as well. But he was grinning when he said it, and Danny had continued unpacking his clothes into Steve's -- their -- closet, and finally, in the end, Steve just pouted and Danny promised kiss it better.

That had led to the expected, first up against the wall then again in the bed where they lay for a while, relaxed and content and half-heartedly fighting the urge to fall asleep. Then Steve pulled himself out of the tangle of naked limbs and walked over to the dresser. Danny watched him with vague interest, mostly only keeping his eyes open because the view from behind of Steve, nude, was pretty awesome. He watched, confused, as Steve pulled out a small radio. There was a bag that hadn't been there before, and Danny realized it was something Steve had brought back with dinner.

"What's that?" he asked, though his words came out slightly slurred from not wanting to lift his head away from the mattress and not wanting to put any real effort into speaking.

Steve smirked, then put a CD in the radio and hit 'play.' Then he came back to the bed and crawled in, pulling Danny half on top of him and settling them in.

"Just something to say welcome home," Steve whispered, giving Danny a kiss on the top of his head. Danny frowned, then heard the first few notes of the songs and he smiled. He squeezed Steve hard, buried his face against his shoulder and kissed the skin there, wanted to do more and wanted not to move. "Love you," he whispered as the music played. As Frank Sinatra's voice sang, Danny felt one of Steve's hands come to rest on his back and the other across his forearm, Steve's fingers right across the sheaths of his claws. He heard Steve whisper under the music, "Love you, too."

And Frank sang, _What a world, what a life, I'm in love._


End file.
